


I'll Tell You That I Love You Then I'll Tear Your World Apart

by volpeanon



Series: Dæmontype [2]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Again, M/M, alex gets the happy bit, and I bully cross, and it's gay on stilts, and this is me doing that, of the complicated is-it-physical-is-it-emotional dæmon kind, unless you haven't noticed: I Like To Bully Cross
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:14:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22930810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volpeanon/pseuds/volpeanon
Summary: "It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your dæmon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love." (The Golden Compass)A companion piece to In The Wind, On My Mind; nobody left the Regan whole.
Relationships: Robert Cross/Alex Mercer
Series: Dæmontype [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1648078
Comments: 4
Kudos: 56





	I'll Tell You That I Love You Then I'll Tear Your World Apart

**Author's Note:**

> A suggestion: I stop writing things deliriously and hungrily at 12am on a work night
> 
> A rebuttal: no

She ran too fast to notice the start of the discomfort that came when they were ten feet apart; she just felt it like a cable catching her under her lungs and pulling hard somewhere between the tenth and thirteenth. When they had done it for the tests, so that his file could have a 'maximum distance separation under laboratory conditions' for probably no good reason more than the curiosity of someone in a lab coat, thirteen feet had had them shaking, resolved only that nothing and no one was worth that pain, that grief. They ignored the disappointed purse of the doctor's lips as they surged back to each other and he buried his face in her ruff and she promised him  _ never, never _ ,  _ never. _

The bond pulled taught between them and she felt it tremble like a bow string, vibrating with Cross’s agony as he tried to run after her and couldn't close the distance. He hit the ground on hands and knees; she kept going, kept pulling, every step wracking her with the sorrow and love that anyone would recognise, and a crushing addition of guilt that was new for her. There was no real choice here, but she was still a dæmon, and she was hurting her man. She told herself it was like when they were young, the countless nips and sometimes bites that she'd given him before he could do something he'd regret. It was like that. They'd regret it forever if they did nothing now.

She reached Alex and sank her teeth into his leg to haul him to a stop. When he looked at her his perpetual scowl melted into pain because this could be easier on him, she could let him go without adding her burden too, but she couldn’t bear to. It was something selfish nestled deep in Cross’s heart that had called out to her when they realised what Alex was doing - damn Manhattan, damn New York, damn the millions of people who would die, Alex Mercer had been through enough, and he would die  _ alone  _ in that helicopter, with no dæmon to love him through the end. They couldn’t let him. If they piled him and all the Wisemen onto anything that would fly and left the city to burn, or even if they climbed into that helicopter and went with him, they would  _ not  _ let him, after everything, end as he had begun. He didn’t  _ deserve  _ that. And they, as selfish as it was, didn’t want to live with the knowledge of it.

She couldn’t say any of that with her mouth clamped around Alex’s leg and there wasn’t time, anyway, she could only cry as he prised her jaws open and took her tight into his arms for a moment. Cross was calling out for both of them, begging them; she couldn’t go back empty handed.

Alex pressed his face to the top of her head. “Get him somewhere safe.” he murmured; then he shoved her so hard she half fell, scrabbling on the wet deck, howling out her failure. The helicopter took off; she stood beneath it, buffeted by the draft from the blades, to watch Alex until he had cleared the Regan. Then the crushing weight of the pain in her chest, and nothing left to give her the strength to withstand it, drew her back to the one she’d left behind, still calling out her name.

She ran into him hard enough to bole him over backwards but he didn’t care - he flung his arms around her and gripped handfuls of her fur, her whines half for him, half for Alex, her bloody muzzle nudging under his chin to licking and gentle him. He couldn’t stop shaking. It still  _ hurt _ . It still felt like his heart was raw, like it was half torn out, and he’d never felt so choked with a shapeless unhappiness and aching, grieving love. Dal pressed her face against his throat, whimpering “I had to, I had to” as he held onto her like he could press her into the hole in his chest where she’d been almost ripped from. He wasn’t angry at her. But oh, god, he’d never felt so miserable, and he never would again.

“He has to come back,” it came out as a hoarse, rattling sob, muffled in her ruff “He has to-”

If they could at least have torn themselves apart for _ something _ \- he thought they might die if they had to live with this reminding them every day that they’d failed when it mattered most.

He didn’t know when he passed out; he woke up on a clean infirmary bed with quiet all around and the lights dim, patched up and dimly aching, but at least now it felt fractionally more like the cracked ribs’ fault. He reached down, wincing, to take a fistfull of Dal’s fur where she lay on the low  bed to the side to keep her off his injuries . He didn’t like her down there, where he could barely see her, couldn’t feel her. He pulled on her fur until the pain dragged her through the vestiges of the anaesthetic, so she could wobble up onto his bed beside him. The press of her against his bruised bones was to be cherished. She tucked his head under her chin, with the hard plastic of the muzzle digging uncomfortably into him.

“You could have-” 

“I wouldn’t.” she couldn’t lick him, but she knocked his head with her jaw until his face was in her fur “I wouldn’t have-”

“What happened to Farre-”

They both shuddered, guilt flaring fresh in her with the memory. Farre’s screams, his tearing, shrieking agony as the helicopter lifted off and he dangled from Cross’s white-knuckled grasp around his arm - the horror when Cross realised Farre’s sharp little stoat dæmon was trapped in an infected’s hand and wasn’t coming with them.

He prayed to god the monsters had snapped her neck before the chopper’s rise tore them apart. It would be better.

Dal whined quietly, more a vibration than a sound. “I wouldn’t, it wasn’t like that.”

He knew. If she’d stopped to ask he would have told her to go, anyway. Didn’t mean that they couldn’t feel what she’d done deep down, something that would never truly heal, its making seared into them forever.

"I should have- if I'd-" his voice caught in his throat, hands curling into painful fists in her fur "I should have been with you, and we should have gone with him."

"It's not your fault."

"You were running and I couldn't even stand up! Dal- I carried Juarez for three days- and I couldn't run the length of a fucking carrier to  _ be _ there with him- he needed me- I fucking-"

She hushed him before he could wake anyone in the surrounding beds. For once, the immobilising drag of the drugs in his system was welcome, and they fell passed out with his arms too tight around her even for sleep to loosen fully.

“No sign.” Solomita glanced surreptitiously at the room around them, even though their conversation was vague enough. His honey badger d æmon sniffed at Dal, but beyond meeting her eyes, she didn’t offer much of a greeting in return. “He’s tough, though. If he got far enough, maybe he could’ve…”

Kealoha elbowed him when she thought it wouldn’t be noticed, and they left soon after. Dal paced up and down between the beds to try and alleviate the ache in Cross’s legs from spending too long in bed.

She didn’t go anywhere near their limit, anywhere near where even the faintest beginnings of the pull should have started, but they could feel the emptiness where once there had been a weight, something tying them together.

“It’s not like that.” she clambered back onto the bed, pulling him from his dark thoughts “We’ve  _ seen  _ Severed. You know we’re not.”

“I don’t know shit about how it works,” he fingered the muzzle’s clasps, but if she got blood on the sheets it would be a round of double checks on all his bandages and patronising chastisements about  _ for your own good _ “What if there’s half way Severed? What if-”

“Rob. Stop it.” if she could she would have nipped him, like when they were young, before her teeth were knives “Please.”

He pulled her down onto him, where her weight on his ribs made it hurt to breathe, and they could both let it smother the aches that were harder to heal.

"You good?"

The lieutenant's bull terrier touched noses with Dal, which was enough, small and seemly a gesture though it had been, for him to tell something wasn't quite as it should be. Dal swished her tail once and turned her gaze away. Cross's noncommittal grunt was no better; the terrier rumbled irritably, but Kealoha hushed him and knocked him away with her leg, murmuring "Not now". 

The team headed out to patrol quiet streets, with Cross lingering at the rear, Dal pressed almost close enough to be in the way as he walked. If they had really wanted to be subtle, this wasn't the way to do it; every dæmon in the team felt the lack of her usual prowling presence among them. He should have told her to go on ahead. He didn't. He kept reaching down to tug gently on her ears and to feel her nose press against his palm for a moment here and there. The muzzle was hanging from his belt; she had asked and for once he hadn't argued.

“When?” she asked at length, in response to the drift of his thoughts.

“Don’t know. Soon.”

“It won’t be easy.”

“Nothing ever is.  _ He  _ would have done it.”

“He’s a one man army.” he noticed her use of tense, and didn’t bring it up “We’re one man, against all of Blackwatch.”

“Then we do nothing and all this happens again. There’ll be more Greenes - there won’t be another Mercer.”

“No, there won’t.”

She knocked against him. The looseness of the link between them hung its own hurt, but it reminded them that however much it ached, Alex had flown out alone - truly alone, in a way they couldn’t even fathom.

Up ahead, Mayhugh’s eagle took a sharp turn, swerving to flap so high that Mayhugh called out sharply for her. His voice was only urgent, not in pain; it still made Cross’s skin crawl, and drew his eye to the dæmon and what had made her-

Just the dark, distant shape of a person on a rooftop he’d visited before, standing where they were easy to see.

Kealoha’s terrier gave Dal one bark as she and Cross flew past them. As they disappeared into the building with a resounding bang of the doors, Duke’s chimp dæmon said “You realise this means we don’t get to go back in time for lunch unless we want to report him MIA” and was duly hushed by almost everyone else.

Athena certainly was a jumping spider, springing itself like an overexcited toddler from Alex to Cross to Dal and back again - but it was the back again jumps that made that familiar twinge in Cross’s chest flare up. The way it scuttled under Alex’s hood to play with the hair at his temples and put its little palps to his jaw every time. The reassurances, the reminders;  _ I’m here, I’m not leaving, I’m here. _ Alex would touch it, with the tip of a finger or covering his hand over it or turning his head to squish it gently against his shoulder with a kiss. He smiled more than Cross had ever seen him.

When he asked one day, quietly "On the Regan. You sounded- are you okay?" and Athena reached one small leg out from where it was sat on his knee, waving it pointedly, Cross felt Dal go tense beside him.

They'd torn themselves apart trying to make Alex stay, and in the end he hadn't, and because he hadn't, he was whole and happier than he'd ever been. It still hurt some days, physically, and others Cross would wake up and feel like he as going to cry without really knowing why.

He reached out and let Athena climb slowly onto the back of his hand, bright, round eyes tilted curiously up at him. He lifted the little body and pressed his lips softly to its abdomen. "It's fine. I'd do it again, if I had to."

Alex looked genuinely worried when he took Cross's other hand and said "Please don't." Maybe he knew more than he let on. Cross pulled him close, so he could press his face into the side of Alex's neck.

"Keep your ass out of trouble, then." he murmured with infinite fondness, Athena crawling into the palm of his hand.


End file.
